Starting from researching musical documents, most of them unpublished, at the “Mazzinian Archive Institute” in Genoa, my doctoral research will focus on a new, modern and innovative way to digitize music scores. My research is ideally divided into three phases:

•  Archive research
•  Examination and evaluation of the possibilities of digitizing
•  Making a sound archive (“playing the archive”)

The first step is completed, with a preliminary digitization of the unpublished scores stored in the archive. About the second phase, I would study and collect information from the academic field, and I was able to establish a dialogue with the National Archival System (SAN) to formalize a digital schedule which is compatible with the ministerial standards and usable on dedicated platforms (music archives http://musica.san.beniculturali.it/). The third and last step will be the realization of the sound archive, through the collaboration with the informatics department (Università degli Studi di Genova).

This type of digitization generates a new way of using the scores themselves, which can go out of the purely musical scope to be included in the field of study at large, for example: cultural studies, media studies and anthropological field. In this paper I intend to present some case studies regarding sheet music and their use in a multidisciplinary way by researchers. This will open a new way of thinking and using the archive, and can be an opportunity to export the study of musical materials in other and complex fields.